Is Advertising Dead?

Adviruses, digimercials, and memegraphics: The future of advertising is the future of media.
Super Bowl XLVII, January 2015, Buffalo, New York: Half a dozen Bills fans huddle around a 40-inch video monitor in Jack Public’s living room, hoping the men in blue can snap a losing streak spanning the last thirteen Super Bowls. The group has been tense and largely silent through a scoreless first quarter, but when quarterback Jim Kelly, Jr. hits a deep receiver for a 45-yard touchdown pass, Jack’s wife, Jane, sends the popcorn flying and the Albertsons nearly choke on their fat-free Fudgesicles.
As the kicker prepares for the extra point, hundreds of marketing executives around the country crack their knuckles over their keyboards. The programmer cablecasting the game will almost certainly take an ad break. For advertisers, the real contest is about to begin.
The kick is good, the announcers say they’ll be right back, and Jack’s screen turns royal blue. A message comes on from a car company: Watch this commercial and we’ll bring a 101-XZ coupe to your house and let you test drive it for a day. “Anybody wanna test drive a 101?” Jack asks. No answer. The message disappears and is replaced with: Watch this commercial and get a case of Wuenderbeer for half price. “I’ll take that,” Jack says, punching a couple of keys on the remote control.
At Wuenderbeer headquarters in Milwaukee, a computer receives Jack’s signal and, referencing a satellite map of his town, instantly creates an animated commercial in which two dragons from another galaxy battle in the streets of Jack’s neighborhood over a giant bottle of Wuenderbeer. Just as the evil dragon is about to smash Jack’s house, the good one drives a neighbor’s chimney through the heart of his nemesis, saving Jack’s home and winning the beer. As Jack’s converter box spits out a bar-coded coupon for a bargain case of suds, the dragon turns to the camera and offers a toast: “Here you go, Mr. and Mrs. Public, this Wuenderbeer’s for you.”
The world of 21st-century telecommunications, with its bumper crop of marketing opportunities for everything from greeting cards to room fresheners, spawns myriad ways to sell products and learn about consumers. Advertising isn’t dead, it’s been reborn. – RS
Advertising in the Interactive Age
To appreciate tomorrow’s multimedia networks, don’t look to the Bob Metcalfes, Ted Nelsons, and Vin Cerfs for ideas and inspiration. Those techno-wonks won’t set the agenda; the Paleys, Sarnoffs, and Disneys of the world will. The economics of advertising, promotion, and sponsorship – more than the technologies of teraflops, bandwidth, and GUI – will shape the virtual realities we may soon inhabit.
Wherever there are audiences, there will be advertisers. As media evolve, so do audiences. Time and geography – more than human nature – separate the captive crowds at the Roman Colosseum from user lists on the Internet. A Roman herald is not a 15-second spot is not an infomercial. Simple broadcast media like radio or television cannot even suggest the options of point-to-point media like the telephone (telemarketing, 900 numbers, voice personals ads) or multipoint-to-multipoint mass media like America Online and the Internet.
The future of media is the future of advertising; the future of advertising is the future of media. The fundamental difference, however, is that the design philosophies of digital media will exert a greater influence on traditional advertising than traditional advertising will hold over the design philosophies of the digerati. In other words, tomorrow’s soft-ads are going to reflect the values of the Net more than tomorrow’s Net will evolve into a digital regurgitation of today’s advertising.
Conceptually brain-dead traditional networkers like NBC’s Tom Rodgers utter half-witticisms like “We deliver eyeballs to advertisers.” Theirs is a future where the commercial metaphors from radio, television, and direct mail are rigorously imprinted upon any network unfortunate enough to carry its information in bits and bytes. (Doubters, please logon to Prodigy….) They just don’t quite get it – yet. The more future-oriented multimedia gurus who know all the buzzwords preach the twin gospels of narrowcasting and interactivity: Do you, Internet, take QVC to be your lawfully wedded interoperable digital shopping medium – ’til death do you part?
But make no mistake – as surely as today’s PBS features endless pledge nights and corporate advertisements masquerading as public service announcements – tomorrow’s digital advertising will be inextricably woven into networks and VR fabrics. The digital David Ogilvy may not have materialized yet, but cyberspace’s commercial future is inevitable. There will be billboards along the Information Superhighway.
Pop media, of course, have a rich tradition of subsidy: In the last century, advertising brought mass affordability to the daily newspaper with the “penny dreadfuls;” in this century, commercial sponsorship turned radio and then television into dominant media. The ongoing explosion of personal and portable media – imbued with ever growing quantities of bandwidth and processing power – is creating opportunities for new kinds of advertisements, sponsorships, and promotions. Can the comfortable cliches of Speedy Alka Selzer, Mr. Whipple, and the Bud Bowl see what’s coming?
Already, a Sega/Nintendo video game offers innovative advertisers potential levels of customer interaction no traditional 30-second spot could dream of. What better way to burn a sales message directly onto the synapses of an impressionable teenager than to craft an exciting, high-speed video game around it? Maybe the Trix rabbit, Cap’n Crunch, and Honey Bear can be turned into kinder, gentler video games for the wee ones….
The fashionable, faux futurism predicts that this time will be different, that this time new media technology will guarantee the individual the upper hand over the advertiser. Maybe; maybe not. More likely, we’ll see these new media renegotiate the power relationships between individuals and advertisers. Yesterday, we changed the channel; today we hit the remote; tomorrow, we’ll reprogram our agents/filters. We’ll interact with advertising where once we only watched; we’ll seek out advertising where once we avoided it. Advertising will not go away; it will be rejuvenated. Here are some scenarios that advertising in the future might spawn.
Sponsored Communication
Consider this completely logical possibility: PDAs like the Newton, Zoomer, and Eo turn out to be wildly successful. Their owners find them indispensable. So they’re using these gizmos all the time to send and receive faxes, e-mail, and phone calls. They’re making maybe one, maybe two dozen calls a day. Perhaps they’re getting twenty or so messages a day, too.
Guess what? That’s really expensive. Customers may balk at a mass medium that costs another $50 a week just to use.
But appropriately packaged PDAs could offer an ideal medium for sponsored e-mail and faxes. (One company already offers a sponsored fax service through the Internet.) If you can program PDAs to screen out unwanted messages and invite ones that interest you, they will become ideal breeding grounds for the latest in software agents. Restaurants, hotels, and banks might be delighted to respond to PDA agent requests asking where one can eat, stay, or find an ATM. Think of the popularity of today’s movie and medical referral phone lines.
A mass market of PDAs creates an enormous demand for electronic Yellow Pages. Before the Bell System break-up, the phone company was described as the most profitable publisher in the world because of its multibillion-dollar Yellow Pages business.
If PDAs are as successful as their proponents pray they’ll be, they’re going to generate a tremendous demand for instantaneous communication and information. Wherever you find a technology mediating instantaneous communication and information, you always find commercial sponsors. Just ask QVC’s Barry Diller.
No doubt, many PDA digimercials will prove to be the annoying equivalent of junk mail and those idiotic automated telemarketing calls. But so what…there’ll be a nice market in software that screens out the junk and highlights what PDA owners want. Advertising – not just innovative technology – may be the best hope to turn PDAs into the next major medium.
Viruses Can Ad Up
Consider this unexpected possibility: David Brin’s delightfully prescient cyberpunk novel Earth describes something called a “courtesy worm.” “It is a guerrilla program – an illegal virus – that goes around targeting people who are too angry and vituperative on the Net. Attracted by unsavory, scatological, and ad hominem phrasing, the worm gets into the flamers’ system and announces, ‘Hello. You have been infected by the program Emilypost because your presence on the Net is impinging upon the rights and enjoyment of others. If you’ll check your credibility ratings, sir, you would soon realize that nobody is listening to you anyway. We suggest you try behaving in a more grown-up manner.'”
Brin envisions a global computer network teeming with viruses both lethal and benign. The Net becomes the key medium for both community and commerce. If an Emilypost virus were to monitor civility, why not a Coca-Cola virus circulating through the Net and attaching itself to any program using the phrase “The Real Thing?” How about a Miller Lite virus that sneaks into any video image of bronzed yuppies frolicking on the summer beach? An Ivory Soap virus that floats into bathtub and shower scenes (so long as they’re not too steamy) might be of interest to Procter & Gamble. The Sony logo virus could insinuate itself onto any nifty electronics devices in an image.
Think of these ad viruses as the digital counterparts to “product placements” in TV and the movies. If the Reese’s Pieces folks were prepared to pay big bucks to be E.T.’s favorite snack, doesn’t it make sense that the candy companies could be prepared to smuggle software simulacra of their products to be props in tomorrow’s high-bandwidth computer nets?
Of course, it would be nothing short of an art to design ad viruses that were just appealing enough to be noticed and remembered, but never so intrusive as to be obnoxious and alienating. If that ubiquitous Ronald McDonald advirus on all the kid’s programming gets too annoying, then the kiddies – or their parents – will stop patronizing the Golden Arches.
But, hey! – hasn’t that always been the challenge for advertising’s most creative minds? Some pop culture philosophers would argue that fifteen-second spots and junk mail already qualify as advertising viruses of the most pernicious sort. Don’t for a moment think that these adviruses reside only in the realms of fiction. Where you could once send only strings of text on the Internet, you can now transmit still pictures, sound, and video imagery. This all makes for a rich multimedia broth in which to grow precisely the sort of adviruses that could create a network of cyberspace commercialism.
No doubt, some netcrawlers will be virulently anti-advirus. They’ll want Lysol-like software to scour and disinfect adviruses from any program before it can be displayed. We’ll see an epidemiological battle between the forces of digital commercialism and purists who think commerce has no place on The Net. Of course, we all know who’ll win that battle, don’t we?
Does It Ad Up?
Ray Smith – chair of the proposed Bell Atlantic/TCI multimedia merger giant – likes to joke that, sometime in the future, you may be “too busy watching the telephone to answer the television.” His colleague, .TCI mogul John Malone, has promised to bring a new generation of smart cable converter boxes to the tops of televisions everywhere. When all video is digitized, encoding and tracking all the ads becomes a snap.
That means a Bell Atlantic/TCI system would be technically capable of offering its customers not just pay-per-view but TV-sans-ads. How many viewers would be willing to pay their local cable system an extra five or ten bucks each month not to see any advertisements? By smoothly regulating the flow of the digital images, the television programs will run seamlessly so that viewers won’t even notice the missing ads.
With just a tiny bit of technical finesse, a Bell Atlantic/TCI could even rig the converters so that subscribers could program what kind of ads they wanted to receive – auto, beer, perfume, jeans – and screen out the ones they didn’t – tampons, public service announcements, detergents. Needless to say, a media distribution company could charge advertisers a pretty penny to identify the households that wanted to see their offerings.
As telephone and cable companies merge and smarten up their networks, they inevitably become powerbroker intermediaries between the advertisers and the viewers. They become the royal gateways for the next generation of advertising.
But what does this next generation of advertising look like? Obviously, the rise of smart networks and programmable agents/filters means that advertisements will become more targeted and selective. Databases will drive many ads over the Net, with smart databases responding to queries by curious consumers. Advertisers and buyers will negotiate for information over the Net. Indeed, WIRED senior columnist and MIT Media Lab Director Nicholas Negroponte has argued that the future of advertising will see a total inversion of traditional practice: Instead of advertisers soliciting response, they’ll respond to solicitations by potential customers.
But what about the nature of the advertisements themselves? Are ads destined to be little more than the shards of targeted databases mating with personal agents and ingenious viruses infecting the Net? More likely, we’ll see advertisements imitate the principles that have enabled Nintendo and Sega to redefine American pop culture. Advertisements will feel and play like visual conversations, video games, and simulations.
To be sure, these commercials will feel nothing like the faux interactivity that pervades the ads on, say, Prodigy. Prodigy’s model of interactivity seems to be designed around the remote control clicker – tap a button, see another screen. This is the laziest possible style of user involvement…click…click…click….
How about, as multimedia designer Robert Fulop suggests, a Prodigy that would let you interactively custom design your Domino’s Pizza in color, on screen, and online – sausage, mushrooms, extra cheese on half – and then automatically routes your order to the nearest Domino’s for delivery?
Ads would become software seducers, enticing and guiding customer interaction. Advertising, information, and transaction would all begin to blur. Interactive ads can evolve into compelling direct-response environments – informative, intimate, and immediate.
The same holds true for games. Sega already offers a video game featuring the 7-Up Spot as the lead character, but that’s merely using the medium for promotion.
Think instead of designing games that blend the properties of the medium with the advertising message. It’s easy to imagine McDonald’s producing an educational video game called, say, Burger Hunt, for its kiddie customers. Ronald McDonald gives the player a random quantity of ‘McDollars’ and the child has to maneuver, Mario-like, through mazes of Hamburglars and other McDonald-Land obstacles to buy and bring back just the right number of burgers, fries, shakes, and McNuggets – plus change – to win.
Such a game would literally reward kids for buying virtual McBurgers. No doubt, PCMCIA card versions of the game will print out redeemable McDonald’s coupons and gift certificates, or plug directly into McDonald’s cash registers. The point is simple: Games are dual purpose – they create compelling experiences and get customers even more involved with the product. Coca-Cola, Toys R Us, PepsiCo, and Nabisco may all ultimately design games to imprint their products onto the neurons of their younger customers. What advertising on MTV was to the youth market of the last decade, video game advertising will be to the youth market of the next.
Similarly, Chrysler or Toyota might develop VR driving games for adolescents and adults to promote their cars. If for no other reason than to differentiate themselves, sophisticated advertisers will invest more capital and creativity in high-involvement media.
American Express, Fidelity, and other financial go-betweens have an enormous stake in garnering high-net-worth investors. Imagine interactive ads built around expert systems that offer custom-calibrated investment advice. A potential customer might answer a series of questions – or be confronted with a set of investment options – and the responses would lead to a digital description of the investor’s risk-profile. Based on that profile, the appropriate financial vehicles would be put on display: venture capital and small-cap stocks for the major risk-seekers, mutual funds and municipal bonds for the more financially faint-of-heart. Tap on the keyboard or utter the right voice command and the transaction is complete. This type of expert-systems model would easily translate to travel planning or finding that perfect wedding present.
So, the focus of advertising design shifts: Ads become a medium of collaboration between potential buyer and potential seller. Indeed, if the interaction and information is crafted appropriately, even the term “advertisement” becomes passe, replaced by a new genre of commercial communication.
Is There a Shopping Gene?
As sweeping and pervasive as the media technology revolution may be, the pace of discovery and innovation in biotechnology is even more startling. The University of Minnesota studies of identical twins – in which identical twins separated at birth frequently smoke the same brand of cigarettes and buy the same brands of clothing – strongly indicate that understanding the human genome could offer insights into the marketplace.
Is it bizarre to envision a time when advertisers and marketers conduct focus groups filled with people of certain genotypes to test their predisposition toward certain advertising campaigns? Wouldn’t an advertiser want to know if shy customers respond more openly to male or female salespeople or quiet versus noisy advertising campaigns? In an era of targeted marketing, might not the human genome be the best database of all?
Of course, the real future of advertising and marketing may rest in the new ecology and the interrelationship between genes and memes. The ‘meme’ was invented over fifteen years ago by Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins as an ingenious way to explain cultural change.
Even though the concept of memes represents the boldest and most provocative theory of how new ideas spread, the word has somehow managed to avoid capture by the advertising, media, and marketing communities. That’s too bad: Memetics offers a new paradigm to explain pop culture. Apparently, more agencies are comfortable drawing inspiration from a double martini than a double helix.
“Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches,” Dawkins writes in The Selfish Gene. “Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain.”
What are the memes that urge us to purchase and consume? How do you splice two or three seemingly disparate memes? What is the appropriate medium to transmit certain memes? VCR? TV? CD? Radio? Do some cultures diffuse advertising memes more efficiently than others? These are the kinds of questions that the meme paradigm will force advertising agencies and their clients to address explicitly. Forget demographics and psychographics. Think memegraphics.
Indeed, the future of advertising may draw design inspirations less from the emerging networks of new media technology than from the powerful metaphors of genetic and memetic engineering.
Let’s Make a Deal (If You Pay Attention, We’ll Pay Your Way)
Once upon a time, before remote control devices and VCRs – way back in 1980 – advertisers and consumers had a clear, if uneasy, bargain. Advertiser to consumer: “You watch my commercials, and I’ll pay for the television program.”
This worked out well for both sides, actually. Marketers knew consumers would at least hear the ads, even if they went to the kitchen during the break. Consumers got a lot of programming for nothing.
Since its invention, mass media has always been subsidized by advertising. The Sunday newspaper that comes to your door may cost $8 or more to manufacture and deliver, but it only costs you $1.50; the balance is paid by advertisers all hoping to catch a glance from you on your way to the sports scores or the local real estate offerings. You can buy Time for as little as $1.09 an issue only because advertisers are willing to spend upwards of $140,000 to place a single page of advertising.
The deal started turning sour for marketers several years ago, however, with the proliferation of cable choices, the TV remote, and the VCR. To the mass media advertiser, these developments spelled disaster.
But in the age of interactivity, this formerly implicit bargain between advertiser and consumer is likely to become decidedly explicit. We’re not just talking about ordering products and services from the comfort of your couch, either. We’re talking about deal city, here.
Imagine getting offers like these when you turn on your television:

“Watch this two-minute video on the new Ford Taurus, and we’ll pay for the pay-per-view movie of your choice.”

“Answer this brief survey from Kellogg and we’ll pay for the next three episodes of Murphy Brown.”

“Push the Tell-Me-More button on your remote at any time during this ten-minute infomercial, and you might win a Caribbean cruise.”

This kind of deal-making is already happening with TV’s interactive cousins. One company in business today, FreeFone, offers to pay consumers to listen to ads whenever they dial their phones. The ads are based on questionnaires each subscriber fills out in advance. And they allow callers to receive more information or to get connected directly to the marketer by touching a button on their phones. The average consumer earns $20 each month listening to ads at 5 to 10 cents each. Another start-up company, HomeFax, proposes to put a fax machine in your home for free if you fill out a one-page product-usage questionnaire every month and agree to receive a limited quantity of unsolicited commercial fax messages each week.
But you can look forward to an even more robust kind of deal-making, brought to you by the “video dial tone.” You could elect to watch every program, news show, sporting event, beauty contest, or movie on a pay-per-view basis. About 25 cents worth of advertising enters your home every time you watch a half-hour prime-time television show today. That should give you some idea of what a programming provider would have to collect to make it an economic proposition. Or you might choose to pay a flat fee for a wide variety of choices, similar to the way cable services are sold today.
If you aren’t in the mood to pay cash for your entertainment, you could choose to receive advertising instead. The right way to think about television advertising in the Interactive Age is to think of it as video mail.
Only there’s a big difference between the video mail you’ll be getting in the future and the 200 pounds or more of unsolicited mail you get every year in your postal mailbox. You don’t own your postal mailbox, and you can’t prohibit hungry marketers from barraging you with every catalog or snap-pack letter they feel like paying for. Empty houses get mail, and you will too.
But a video dial-tone service of your choice will maintain your video mailbox to your own specifications. Want no more than three commercials a day? You’re the boss. Never want to hear from Rodeway Inns again? Okay, boss, done.
For their part, companies will have a new advantage: the computational power to remember every detail of a customer’s transaction history. (It’s about time. After all, customers have always been able to remember their interactions with companies.) Manufacturers and service providers are bringing to market an increasing assortment of highly customized goods and services – “customerized” products, individually tailored to meet individual needs, one customer at a time.
The rapidly declining effectiveness of mass media, coupled with the rise of addressable, interactive media – one-to-one media – makes one-to-one marketing necessary for any competitor to survive and prosper in the Interactive Age.
The new rules of engagement governing business competition will focus on customer share rather than market share. Success in this new environment will require:
Producing a high-quality product and service, because share-of-customer strategies are based on repeat purchases and customer referrals
Developing long-term relationships with customers, in order to increase individual customers’ lifetime values
Differentiating among customers, so as to allocate the most effort and resources to those customers who are the most valuable, and
Initiating, maintaining, and improving dialogues with individual consumers, abandoning the old-fashioned advertising monologues of mass media.
So if these are the new rules, what kind of “advertising” will characterize the one-to-one, interactive future? For starters, interactivity may mean the end of those obnoxious television spots that seem designed to irritate viewers into remembering the products. “Ring around the collar” and “Aetna, I’m glad I met ya” are doomed. Good riddance.
In the one-to-one future, three forms of advertising will dominate interactive media:
Invitational advertising: Successful advertisers will have to stop their frenetic shouting at customers, and will instead offer polite invitations designed to initiate or continue individual customer dialogues. Starting a dialogue, either with a current customer or with a potential new customer, will be the primary goal of any marketer hoping eventually to sell products or services. Advertisers will no longer find it beneficial to irritate viewers into remembering their brands. Not only is this a bad way to begin a dialogue, but it is very likely that in the interactive future a consumer who feels irritated with a certain ad or brand will be capable of forbidding that brand from appearing on his own set again.
Solicited advertising: On the other hand, there will indeed be a booming market for advertising-on-demand. Consumers will look up advertising whenever they wish to begin thinking about buying something, or when they want to compare prices, features, or services. We have two principal forms of solicited advertising today, both in print: classified ads and Yellow Pages, the two largest and fastest growing advertising vehicles. Electronic, interactive versions of these media will represent a significant form of advertising in the one-to-one future.
Integral advertising: As customers opt out of traditional shotgun advertising (why? because they can), advertisers will, more and more, include brand messages as integral parts of entertainment and information programs. Product placement in movies is already big business, with clear distinctions in placement fees between background use and, say, handling by the hero. In the future, we will see a greater fusion of publicity, advertising, and careful product placement in nearly every media outlet.
The changes in advertising will challenge those creative types charged with marketing “badge” products, from athletic shoes and beer to automobiles and fashion accessories. Mass media advertising pitches to people who are not now, and never will be, customers. This is not a mistake. After all, it’s no fun to pay $200 for a pair of shoes, or $40,000 for a car, if your friends haven’t heard of the brand. Does this ensure some continuing home for mass media advertising?
Some say the mass marketing game is changing. They’re wrong. That game is over, and the rules for an entirely new game are only just now being written. But one thing is certain: In the one-to-one future, the consumer will be the one in the driver’s seat, and the advertiser will be thumbing a ride. – Don Peppers and Martha Rogers
It’s the Content, Stupid
“You can have all the technology you want, but it won’t help you if you don’t have ideas,” says George Lois, chair and creative director of Lois/ USA (shown on our cover with his younger colleague, Richard Kirshenbaum).
Lois creates advertising for such clients as Time Warner, Reebok, Pepsi, and the AFL-CIO, and last year billed more than $144 million. “I’m a philistine when it comes to technology, but I don’t care,” he says. “It all comes down to big thinking. That means being creative.”
Creative means coming up with quick, catchy slogans – like “Go to Elle,” “I Want My MTV” – or creating daring covers for magazines, or convincing
Braniff Airlines to paint its planes pink to attract attention and spur business. (It didn’t work.) “George Lois believes that a good ad should work by tomorrow morning,” says Andrew Jaffe, vice president and executive editor of Adweek. “You need to knock ’em dead right away or it’s no good.”
When asked about how today’s notions of advertising might need to be adjusted to work effectively in a digital world, Lois is nonplussed. “I’m the wrong guy to talk to about technology because I don’t think it matters,” he says. Sure, he concedes, we’ll deliver our messages differently in a digital world. We’ll probably figure out new ways of implementing ideas and selling slogans, and ads will be targeted to more precise audiences. But that’s trivial. The basic human sensibility that responds to good advertising and legitimizes good advertising, Lois insists, will remain the same. “Look,” he expounds. “There are people in this industry who’ve been trying to figure out how to do TV advertising for 40 years, and they still don’t get it. It’s in your gut. The day computers will ever be able to do your thinking for you is the day I’ll turn into a girl.”
If Lois is the grand old man of New York chutzpah, the beat generation’s gift to advertising, then Richard Kirshenbaum is a sort of thirtysomething hero. Kirshenbaum was 26 when he left New York ad agency J. Walter Thompson in 1987 to start his own agency with art director Jon Bond, 29.
“All Kirshenbaum & Bond had for an office was a beach chair, a typewriter, and a 7-x-9-foot space on 42nd Street in New York,” he says. “We had no air conditioning and it was one of hottest and muggiest summers ever.”
Still, it was worth it. In 1990 the Young Entrepreneurs Organization honored him as one of the most successful executives under 30 (second only to Michael Dell). Today, Kirshenbaum employs close to 100 people, and his 1993 billings were in excess of $100 million. He created those Snapple ads that you can’t seem to escape from, and does work for Coach, Hennessy, Moeet, Kenneth Cole, and many of New York’s upscale men’s clothing stores. What’s his secret? “Part of the reason we succeeded in advertising is because everyone else out there was so bad at it,” he explains.
Although Kirschenbaum doesn’t represent any high-tech brands, using technology is an integral part of the creative process at his agency. Still, he agrees with Lois (who took over the No Excuses Jeans account a few years ago when Kirshenbaum resigned from it) that technology is a tool that’s secondary to the creative process.
“Interactive is a too-much-hyped buzzword, and I hate buzzwords,” he says. “Everyone’s saying ‘interactive this, interactive that,’ and ‘I’m going to be so interactive.’ Why doesn’t everyone learn how to be interactive with people first, not technology? Then maybe they’ll get somewhere.” Kirshenbaum grants that in the future our lives might be increasingly focused around computers and online services, but “advertising can only wait and respond to that,” he says. Advertising is reflective of its time; people who blame advertising for everything from anorexia to general mental vapidity should take a hard look at themselves. “We don’t create a Kate Moss without the world first telling us they want that.” – David Dix

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